Definitions of RainKing’s Technology Categories

Our research team has profiled over 20,000 individual technologies in our database that are tagged to both Company and People profiles. These technologies fall under parent categories and child categories.

Lifecycle Management: Application Life-Cycle Management (ALM) software is used to manage the application development and maintenance process. It has tools used for requirements assessment, quality assurance, coding, testing, and release management.

PaaS: Platform as a Service (PaaS) allows customers to develop and manage a web applications through cloud technologies, and pass along the care of an infrastructure to the host.

Programming Languages: An interpreted language for the computer to receive instructions and act upon.

Testing and Performance: Performance Testing & Analysis Software enables testing network and IT systems for performance, interoperability and compliance with standards and functional specifications; simulating users, traffic, and transactions, and other parameters, in order to determine and optimize system availability, capacity, security and other parameters.

Web Tools/Resources: Web Tools are a designer’s toolkit for creating a website.

Data Analytics/Databases:

Big Data/NoSQL: Big Data is large amounts of data that are analyzed using software to reveal and obtain information about patterns and trends. A NoSQL database is a non-relational database and provides a unique mechanism of information handling often used for handling Big Data.

Business Intelligence: Business Intelligence software provides relevant information about a work group or company.

Data Modeling/Mining: Data Modeling is a blueprint look at how data gets documented via existing processes and gives the ability to identify any errors before code gets written. Data Mining is software used to gather data and extract new information from a dataset.

Data Tools: Software tools used to gather and compile data to extract information.

Data Warehousing: Data Warehousing aids an organization’s management capabilities by compiling all of the company’s information into a library and allowing users to pull out information as needed.

Master Data Management: Master Data Management Software providing processes for collecting, aggregating, matching, consolidating, quality-assuring, persisting and distributing data throughout an organization to ensure consistency and control in the ongoing maintenance and application use of this information.

Relational Databases: A database structured to recognize relations among stored items of information.

Web Analytics: Web Analytical Software is used to collect, analyze and report on website activities. The measurements and analysis is typically used to report, improve and or optimize websites and Internet activities

Productivity/Operations:

BPM: Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to making an organization’s workflow more effective, more efficient and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment.

Email/Messaging: Email is a means of communication between 2 or more users at any physical location with a connection to the world wide web.

IT Service Management (ITSM): IT service management (ITSM) refers to the entirety of activities – directed by policies, organized and structured in processes and supporting procedures – that are performed by an organization or part of an organization to plan, deliver, operate and control IT services offered to customers

Project Management: Project management is the application of processes, methods, knowledge, skills and experience to achieve the project objectives.

Transaction Software and eCommerce: Eccomerce is commercial transactions conducted electronically on the Internet.

Information Management:

Collaboration: Collaboration Software automates and manages the workflow of a work-group or entity. This software enables information or tasks to be passed from one or more participants and or resources, according to a set of procedural rules.

Content Management: Content Management Software provides the collection, taxonomy analysis of information and search and retrieval functionality and design. This software can also automatically scan content according to a predefined set of rules for future cross-referenced retrieval. Additional capabilities include the application of common publishing templates for common look and feel within a work-group or entity wide application.

Enterprise Learning: An individual’s ability to use opportunities to develop enterprising capabilities that enable them to successfully and confidently manage their life, learning and work into the future.

Imaging and Graphics: Imaging is the capture, storage, manipulation, and display of images. Graphics are a computer-generated image.

Multimedia Streaming and Editing: Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. Editing is preparing written and/or graphic material for publication by correcting, condensing, or otherwise modifying it.

Publishing/Writing: Writing is written work, especially with regard to its style or quality. Publishing is the final phase of the writing process.

Search: An act of searching for someone or something.

User Experience: User Experience is the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.

Enterprise/ERP:

CRM: Customer relationship management (CRM) is a system for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. It often involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): Enterprise Resource Planning is a process by which a company (often a manufacturer) manages and integrates the important parts of its business.

Academic and Education Management Software: Software primarily used for academia.

Clinical: Clinical treatment relates to the observation and treatment of patients in a healthcare setting.

eDiscovery/Case Management: Case management is a collaborative process of assessment, planning, facilitation, care coordination, evaluation, and advocacy for options and services to meet an individual’s and family’s comprehensive health needs through communication and available resources to promote quality, cost-effective outcomes.

Financial Trading: Financial trading signifies financing for trade, and it concerns both domestic and international trade transactions.

Health Records: Electronic Health Records are a compilation of a patients care and provide a more comprehensive look into their care history.

Healthcare Management: Healthcare management is involved with those organizations that deal with patients in both direct care, and non-direct care settings.

Laboratory: A room or building equipped for scientific experiments, research, or teaching, or for the manufacture of drugs or chemicals.

Pharmacy: A store where medicinal drugs are dispensed and sold.

Professional Services Software: Professional Services Software is a company’s ability to implement and support software products for users.

Application Security: Application security is the use of software and hardware to protect applications.

Endpoint Protection: Endpoint Protection is software designed to protect the user from malicious activities over the internet.

Governance, Risk and Compliance: Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance are three pillars that work together for the purpose of assuring that an organization meets its objectives.

Identity and Access Management: Identity and Access Management software is a form of security that enables users to access their information without fear of losing control over it.

Mobile Security: Mobile security is the protection of smartphones, tablets, laptops and other portable computing devices via software and hardware.

Network Security: Network Security is an organization’s ability to keep information within a network and prevent any loss of data.

Secure Gateway: A Secure Gateway establishes a connection to a network through a virtual private network. This enables a user to connect to a network on a “borrowed” computer (e.g. library computer) without having to download a client.

Web/Cloud Security: Software and Hardware used to protect a company’s data infrastructure

Data Storage:

Cloud Storage: Cloud storage is a model of data storage where the digital data is stored in logical pools, the physical storage spans multiple servers (and often locations), and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company.

Call Center: A call center is an office set up to handle a large volume of telephone calls, especially for taking orders and providing customer service.

Communications Infrastructure/Network Management: A network management system is a set of hardware and/or software tools that allow an IT professional to supervise the individual components of a network within a larger network management framework.

Content Delivery Networks: A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver webpages and other Web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and a content delivery server.

Mobile Device Management: Mobile device management (MDM) is an industry term for the administration of mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers.

Mobile Devices: A portable computing device such as a smartphone or tablet computer.

Public Utility Networks: A public utility network is an organization that maintains the infrastructure as a government service.

Telephony/VOIP: VoIP is short for Voice over Internet Protocol. Voice over Internet Protocol is a category of hardware and software that enables people to use the Internet as the transmission medium for telephone calls by sending voice data in packets using IP rather than by traditional circuit transmissions of the PSTN.

Video Conferencing: Videoconferencing (VC) is the conduct of a videoconference (also known as a video conference or video teleconference) by a set of telecommunication technologies which allow two or more locations to communicate by simultaneous two-way video and audio transmissions.

Wireless Networks: Wireless networking is a method by which homes, telecommunications networks and enterprise (business) installations avoid the costly process of introducing cables into a building, or as a connection between various equipment locations.

Data Infrastructure:

Cloud Systems: A model for delivering information technology services in which resources are retrieved from the internet through web-based tools and applications, rather than a direct connection to a server. Data and software packages are stored in servers.

Desktop Virtualization: Desktop virtualization is software technology that separates the desktop environment and associated application software from the physical client device that is used to access it.

Email Hosting: An email hosting service is an Internet hosting service that operates email servers. Email hosting services usually offer premium email at a cost as opposed to advertisement-supported free email or free webmail.

End User Hardware: End User Hardware is the equipment a human individual will be using to access your technology and is an important consideration for manufacturers who must consider the viewpoint of those who will use it.

Hosting: Store (a website or other data) on a server or other computer so that it can be accessed over the Internet.

IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a service model that delivers computer infrastructure on an outsourced basis to support enterprise operations.

Mainframes/Server Hardware: A large high-speed computer, especially one supporting numerous workstations or peripherals.

Middleware: software that acts as a bridge between an operating system or database and applications, especially on a network.

Peripheral Hardware: A peripheral device is generally defined as any auxiliary device such as a computer mouse or keyboard, that connects to and works with the computer in some way.

Server and Operating Systems: A server operating system, also called a server OS, is an operating system specifically designed to run on servers, which are specialized computers that operate within a client/server architecture to serve the requests of client computers on the network.

Server Virtualization: Server virtualization can be defined as the conversion of one physical server into several individual & isolated virtual spaces that can be taken up by multiple users as per their respective requirements.

Advertising/Search:

Online Advertising: Online advertising is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers.

Search Marketing: Search marketing is the process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts.

Search Engine Optimization: the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.

Digital Media Operations: Digital media are any media that are encoded in a machine-readable format.

Analytics:

Customer Intelligence: Customer intelligence (CI) is the process of gathering and analyzing information regarding customers; their details and their activities, in order to build deeper and more effective customer relationships and improve strategic decision making.

Market Analytics: Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing and analyzing marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI).

Business Intelligence: Business intelligence, or BI, is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an organization’s raw data.

Web Analytics: Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.

Marketing Data Management: Market data is price and trade-related data for a financial instrument reported by a trading venue such as a stock exchange.

Social Analytics: Social analytics is a philosophical perspective developed since the early 1980s. The theoretical object of the perspective is socius, a kind of “commonness” that is neither a universal account nor a communality shared by every member of a body.

Creative/Content:

Customer Experience Management: Customer experience management (CEM) is the collection of processes a company uses to track, oversee and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifecycle.

Website Design: The term website design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the clint-side design of a website including writing mark up.

Mobile Design: The term mobile design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the client side design of mobile web applications.

User Experience: the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.

eCommerce:

Social Commerce: Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves social media, online media that supports social interaction, and user contributions to assist online buying and selling of products and services.

Mobile Commerce: The use of wireless handheld devices such as cellular phones and laptops to conduct commercial transactions online.

Online Retailing: The sale of goods and services through the Internet. Electronic retailing, or e-tailing, can include business-to-business and business-to-consumer sales.

Product/Brand Management:

Advertising and Promotion: Advertising is bringing a product (or service) to the attention of potential and current customers. Promotion keeps the product in the minds of the customer and helps stimulate demand for the product.

Forecasting and Planning: Forecasting is used by companies to determine how to allocate their budgets for an upcoming period of time.

Marketing Project Management: The Marketing Project Manager is the agency’s control tower, managing workload and resources with precision.

Marketing Portfolio Management: Portfolio management is all about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the choice of debt vs. equity, domestic vs. international, growth vs. safety, and many other tradeoffs encountered in the attempt to maximize return at a given appetite for risk.

Mobile Product Management: Mobile Product management is an organizational lifecycle function within a company dealing with the planning, forecasting, and production, or marketing of a product at all stages of the product lifecycle

Mobile Application and Content Services: A mobile application is software designed to run on a mobile device, mobile content is any form of media that can be used or accessed on a mobile device.

Mobile Messaging: A mobile phone messaging service that enables the user to use special versions of instant messaging clients through their mobile device, rather than desktop PC.

Sales/Marketing Automation:

Marketing Database Administration: A database administrator is an IT professional responsible for the installation, configuration, upgrading, administration, monitoring, maintenance, and security of databases in an organization.

Email Marketing: Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email.

Digital Marketing Management: Digital marketing is marketing that makes use of electronic devices to engage with stakeholders.

Social:

Digital Social Content: Social content represents content and link sharing on various social media platforms.

Public Relations and Social Media: Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.

Social Applications: Social applications are software designed with social media as a baseline.

Online Communities/Collaboration: An online community is a virtual community whose members interact with each other primarily via the Internet.

Media Monitoring: Media monitoring is the process of reading, watching or listening to the editorial content of media sources on a continuing basis, and then, identifying, saving and analyzing content that contains specific keywords or topics.

Webinars: A seminar conducted over the Internet.

Tradeshow Management: An exhibition for companies in a specific industry to showcase and demonstrate their new products and services.